You Want Angry?

How can you tell when Dean Johnson is acting as a shill for the metrocrat DFLers?

When his lips are moving.

Of course, being that Johnson is the worst public speaker since Jerry Janezich, you don't want those lips to start moving.

Johnson, the DFL leader in the Senate, broke a promise to bring the Minnesota Personal Protection Act to the floor of the Senate as a stand-alone bill:

An apparent deal to reenact Minnesota's invalidated handgun law disintegrated Thursday over a move to subject it to a Senate committee hearing.

"It's probably not going to happen now," said House Speaker Steve Sviggum, R-Kenyon, who accused his DFL counterpart in the Senate of reneging on a handshake promise to give the measure an immediate floor vote.

Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar, said he is going forward with new plans to give the bill its first hearing ever in a Senate panel. Because of opposition from fellow DFL senators, he added, if he had stuck to the earlier agreement "the bill would have died."

What that means, of course, is a return to the status quo that the Concealed Carry reform bill faced for its last four years in the legislature; more than enough votes to pass it in both houses, but bottled up in committees in the Senate that are controlled by metro-area DFL "Metrocrats" - big-state, pro-victim-disarmament, pro-criminal patsies like Ellen "Hysterical Ellen" Anderson, Matt "Every Dead Criminal Is One Less Metro DFLer" Entenza, and Wes "The Slander Machine" Skoglund.

And to them, the mission is clear; defeat concealed carry by any means necessary, fair or foul.

At issue is a 2003 law that allowed about 27,000 people to get Minnesota permits to carry firearms in public before two courts struck it down on grounds that it was unconstitutionally enacted as part of a bill that embraced more than one subject.

Pending an expected review by the Minnesota Supreme Court, the permits remain valid, but new issuances are now governed by a former law that gives police chiefs and sheriffs broad discretion to deny applicants.

And, by the way, invalidates all those "no guns in our store" signs that popped up around the metro.

Johnson said Wednesday that he had originally agreed to a swift floor vote on the bill, which is nearly identical to the 2003 law. But then he decided to let an ad hoc panel of DFL senators dominated by the measure's critics and a standing committee review the bill for possible amendments.

And that, Sviggum said, means "the bill will either not reappear or appear in a form that is unacceptable. The Senate committee process shouldn't be allowed to kill the bill."

But the Metrocrats know that that is exactly their only chance of beating the bill. Democracy must be squelched; the oligarchy of metro kingmakers, scaremongers and condo pinks are markers, being called in right about now.

Johnson said the bill would likely get even stronger support in the Senate now, following Minnesota's two years of relatively peaceful experience with liberal handgun permitting.

But Sviggum said he probably won't schedule a House floor vote on the bill under the current circumstances because it would be a waste of time. Without Johnson's earlier promise, he added, he wouldn't have authorized Wednesday's House committee meeting that advanced the bill on a 7-5 party-line vote.

Other Republicans and gun-rights advocates focused Thursday on Johnson's reversal of course.

"It's impossible to negotiate with him because you can't trust a single word he's going to say," Joe Olson, president of Concealed Carry Reform Now Inc. said at a State Capitol news conference where Sen. Carrie Ruud, R-Breezy Point, showed off a dance step she called "the Willmar Waffle."

Meanwhile, Sen. Pat Pariseau, R-Farmington, chief Senate sponsor of the handgun bill, acknowledged that passing legislation without Senate committee hearings "may not be a good idea, but it's the only way we could get it through."

Indeed.

As long as the metro DFL has a stranglehold on the Senate committee process, the current, patriarchal, racist gun permit law will remain in force.

Johnson, however, said such hearings were necessary "so we don't find ourselves back in court like the Republicans did the last time around."

Then he lobbed another shot across the aisle: "There's one common attribute among the Republicans - anger. It cost them 13 [House] seats in the last election."

Leave aside that Johnson - a born monotone - is lying again.

Wanna know why we're angry, Dean Johnson, you vacuous shill?

This sort of thing. Statist toadies like you, playing dipsy political games with our rights - in this case, our right to defend ourselves and our families from the scum that you and your colleagues seem so queasy about inconveniencing with, y'know, a society that can actually harm them back.

You haven't seen anger, Dean Johnson.

Posted by Mitch at April 28, 2005 06:12 PM | TrackBack